Clearly and Simply

Tag: highlighting

  • Select and Highlight across an Excel Dashboard

    Interactive Excel Dashboard visualizing unemployment rates in the EU. Select a country, filter by age group and gender, and see the selection highlighted across all visuals on the dashboard

    1,176 words, ~6 minutes read

    Excel_EU_unemployment_rates_dashboard10 years ago, I published a post demonstrating how to highlight one selected item across all charts and views on an interactive Excel Dashboard:

    Highlighting on Excel Dashboards

    Unlike most of my other publications here, that post actually did make some friends.

    And even more, it won a real fan: my good friend and Microsoft Excel MVP Carlos Barboza (Carlos’ LinkedIn Profile, Carlos’ blog: Spilled Graphics) liked this workbook so much that he even included it in some of his presentations, e.g. his great speech on the Global Excel Summit in 2024.

    Recently Carlos asked me, if I could provide a version with an updated data source. Of course I can. And while I was at it, I also made a couple of (hopefully helpful) changes.

    Today’s article provides this updated version of my European Union Unemployment Rates Dashboard from 2015. It also briefly discusses why interactive dashboards in Excel are still a viable option, even nowadays with Tableau and Power BI.

    (more…)

  • Highlighting on Excel Dashboards

    Highlight one selected item across all charts and views of an Excel Dashboard: an example and the how-to

    Dashboard EU Unemployment RatesVery often, a dimension is displayed on more than one view of a dashboard.

    Let’s say you want to analyze data of the European Union. Chances are that you will have the dimension “member state” on more than one of your charts.

    If you pull these charts together into one dashboard, highlighting a selected member state across all charts is very helpful to explore and analyze the data. It supports the user to easily focus on the selected state and to identify its position in the context of all members at a glance.

    Highlighting is the very simple act of selecting one item out of many (by e.g. clicking) and automatically seeing this item emphasized in all views across the entire dashboard. This is a very effective and user-friendly visualization technique and should be available on every interactive dashboard.

    Today’s post shows how to implement highlighting on an Excel dashboard. As always, including the Excel workbook for free download.

    (more…)